The materials in this collection constitute a semi-random sample of the pre-war archive that was transferred to the Central State Archives of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic following the liquidation of the Vilnius Jewish Museum in 1949. The collection includes records of YIVO work and activities, financial records, correspondence, and publications; documents about pogroms in Ukraine, and Red Army and Soviet activity in Vilna and Bialystok; and a significant amount of records of socialist, communist, and Zionist political parties, as well as associated newspapers and one-time publications.

The collection contains extensive correspondence of Baumgardt including letters from the front to his family during World War I, and correspondence with Conrad Aiken, Hannah Arendt, Julius Bab, Bertha Badt-Strauss, Leo Baeck, Isaiah Berlin, Walter Benjamin, Hugo Bergmann, Kurt Blumenfeld, Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss, Martin Buber, John Dewey, Dora Edinger, Albert Einstein, Ismar Elbogen, Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, Felix Frankfurter, Sigmund Freud, Georg Heym, Salomo Friedlaender (Mynona), Max Gruenewald, Hermann Hesse (including photos, watercolors, autographed poems), Sidney Hook, Rudolf Kayser, Wolfgang Koehler, Hans Kohn, Georg Landauer, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Hans Margolius, Reinhold Niebuhr, Erwin Panofsky, Jacob Picard, Kurt Pinthus, Joachim Prinz, Hyman Rickover, Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Schlesinger, Hans Joachim Schoeps, Gershom Scholem, Toni Sender, Ernst Simon, Chaim Weizmann, Beatrice Webb, Robert Weltsch, and Arnold Zweig.

Also included are manuscripts, articles, lectures, and offprints by and about Baumgardt on philosophy, ethics, religion, literature, politics, and other subjects; transcripts of conversations with Einstein and Freud.

Correspondence and reviews about publication of Horizons of a Philosopher (the Festschrift for David Baumgardt).

Letters, notes, and manuscripts by Dorothy Canfield Fischer.

Photos of Baumgardt's family and friends.

Organizational records of the Zionist youth group Ha-Poel Ha-Zair, including minutes of the central council of the organization in Berlin and letters from Georg Landauer, Eugen Taeubler and Robert Weltsch, 1919-1921.

[AV collection (records)] Interview with Voice of America, February 23, 1955 ( 1 record)

[OS 80] Article "Erwachen der Romantik" (1930) (copy in Box 16, Folder 16); page from the Juedische Rundschau with notes by Baumgardt (copy in Box 18, Folder 19); speech "Jeremy Bentham, an Englishman, to the Citizens of the Several American United States, London 1817" (copy in Box 24, Folder 2)

[R 12] Sigmund Freud Autographs (copies in file).

The National Committee for Labor Israel (NCLI) was an American fundraising organization closely associated with Israel’s federation of labor and trade unions (Histadrut). NCLI provided financial support for the Histadrut’s educational, health, and social programs in Israel through national and regional solicitation campaigns. Major donors included Labor Zionist organizations, American labor unions, and other Jewish community associations. Financial problems eventually led to the dissolution of NCLI, and the bulk of this collection documents its final decades of operation. A large portion of the records pertain to development projects in Israel during the 1960s -1970s.

Abraham Charasch Collection documents Abraham Charasch’s involvement with various Jewish political parties and Jewish student organizations in the Russian Empire and abroad prior to the October Revolution of 1917. Most materials collected here deal with the Union of Eastern Jewish Student Organizations in Western Europe and Zionist Socialist Worker’s Party. Included here is correspondence, by-laws, reports, resolutions, minutes of meetings, declarations, circular letters, lists of delegates to student conferences, memoranda, manuscripts, bibliographies, and applications sent to the Swiss Central Committee for the Return of Political Immigrants.

The Marc Ratner Papers consist of materials pertaining to Marc Ratner's political activities as one of the leaders of the SERP (Sotsialisticheskaya Yevreyskaya Rabochaya Partiia, Jewish Socialist Workers' Party, Rus: Социалистическая еврейская рабочая партия) which was a left leaning Zionist revolutionary party. The collection consists of correspondence, circular letters, clippings, minutes of meetings, essays, manuscripts, political resolutions and statements. The bulk of the collection consists of correspondence between party members, minutes of meetings and manuscripts.

The American League for a Free Palestine was organized in 1944 to help with the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. The collections consists of correspondence, financial statements, lists, pamphlets, fliers, advertisements, news clippings and other ephemera.